If I were to make an attempt at connecting the dots here, I’d say that perhaps these are the two compass points by which Tokarczuk interprets her life’s meaning – one, the flightiness of her nature and two, the solidity of her physical existence. If you were surprised to hear that this quirky little book is almost as much about gross body parts as it is about intercontinental travel, you wouldn’t be alone.Įven having a bit of warning about it doesn’t prepare you for the sudden onslaught of fetuses in formaldehyde that Tokarczuk unleashes. Which is absolutely right – it’s a book about travelling, for travellers (if only of the mind), requiring the one thing that only travellers can truly do: shake off of the habitual and embrace the thoroughly weird.
I can think of no better travel companion in these turbulent, fanatical times. Hotels on the continent would do well to have a copy of Flights on the bedside table. When I was reading up about this book, I saw that one critic from the Guardian had said this about it: The overall effect is like picking up a very interesting, eloquent person’s travel notebook, or sitting next to a chatty person on a plane. Some are long enough to get into and get attached to the characters, where the others are presented as simply brief little thoughts noted down for posterity.
Here we have everything from two paragraph observations on the flight from Irkutsk to Moscow through to short stories with recurring characters. In effect, Flights is lots of little thoughts gathered together in something akin to a traveller’s notebook. The style is pleasingly unpretentious, which I wasn’t expecting given that terror of a blurb. Yet, Flights is actually a surprisingly easy read, much of this surely down to the excellent translation by Jennifer Croft which reads like an English original. It interweaves travel narratives and reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion and migration. What to expect from a book that promises this?:įlights, a novel about travel in the twenty-first century and human anatomy, is Olga Tokarczuk’s most ambitious to date. I have the Fitzcarraldo edition of Flights, and that austere blue cover plus the blurb (as below) had me feeling a little bit nervous starting this one.
When should you read ‘Flights’? On a plane, on the way to an exotic wilderness.
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